I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.

The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Black eyed angels swam at me," Yorke sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe.

The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Criep!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Egyptian Song," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Creep?" I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.

For further testament, Chip Chanko and I both suffered auto-debilitating accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Airbag" in our respective Japanese imports. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my car, just as I'd feared passing 18- wheelers after nearly being crushed by one in 1990. With good reason, I suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Kid A-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered.

Even the heralded OK Computer has been nudged down one spot in Valhalla. Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as "rock" (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it's jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don't come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world. Ransom, the philologist hero of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet who is kidnapped and taken to another planet, initially finds his scholarship useless in his new surroundings, and just tries to survive the beautiful new world.

This is an emotional, psychological experience. Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Radiohead hated being Radiohead, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Radiohead record yet.

"Everything in Its Right Place" opens like Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs. As your ears decide whether the tones are coming or going, Thom Yorke's Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue. "Everything," Yorke belts in uplifting sighs. The first-person mantra of "There are two colors in my head" is repeated until the line between Yorke's mind and the listener's mind is erased.

Skittering toy boxes open the album's title song, which, like the track "Idioteque," shows a heavy Warp Records influence. The vocoder lullaby lulls you deceivingly before the riotous "National Anthem." Mean, fuzzy bass shapes the spine as unnerving theremin choirs limn. Brash brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Yorke screams, begs, "Turn it off!" It's the album's shrill peak, but just one of the incessant goosebumps raisers.
After the rockets exhaust, Radiohead float in their lone orbit. "How to Disappear Completely" boils down "Let Down" and "Karma Police" to their spectral essence. The string-laden ballad comes closest to bridging Yorke's lyrical sentiment to the instrumental effect. "I float down the Liffey/ I'm not here/ This isn't happening," he sings in his trademark falsetto. The strings melt and weep as the album shifts into its underwater mode. "Treefingers," an ambient soundscape similar in sound and intent to Side B of Bowie and Eno's Low, calms after the record's emotionally strenuous first half.

The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Optimistic" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs. The lyrics seemingly taunt, "Try the best you can/ Try the best you can," before revealing the more resigned sentiment, "The best you can is good enough." For an album reportedly "lacking" in traditional Radiohead moments, this is the best summation of their former strengths. The track erodes into a light jam before morphing into "In Limbo." "I'm lost at sea," Yorke cries over clean, uneasy arpeggios. The ending flares with tractor beams as Yorke is vacuumed into nothingness. The aforementioned "Idioteque" clicks and thuds like Aphex Twin and Bjork's Homogenic, revealing brilliant new frontiers for the "band." For all the noise to this point, it's uncertain entirely who or what has created the music. There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin. This is part of the unique thrill of experiencing Kid A.

Pulsing organs and a stuttering snare delicately propel "Morning Bell." Yorke's breath can be heard frosting over the rainy, gray jam. Words accumulate and stick in his mouth like eye crust. "Walking walking walking walking," he mumbles while Jonny Greenwood squirts whale-chant feedback from his guitar. The closing "Motion Picture Soundtrack" brings to mind The White Album, as it somehow combines the sentiment of Lennon's LP1 closer-- the ode to his dead mother, "Julia"-- with Ringo and Paul's maudlin, yet sincere LP2 finale, "Goodnight." Pump organ and harp flutter as Yorke condones with affection, "I think you're crazy." To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album's overall theme, Yorke bows out with "I will see you in the next life." If you're not already there with him.

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Santa Claus, the Virgin Mary, and Terrence "Turkeytime" Terrence just got the shaft this holiday season. Why bother with presents? 2005's Tickle Me Elmo was supposed to be a chicken-legged Sri Lankan with so much sex in her self-spun neons you might as well get wasted off penicillin with Willie Nelson at a secret Rex the Dog show. But guess what? On Halloween she showed up in Philadelphia for her Fader gig, sat herself under a big fucking Christmas tree, and dished out free copies of Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1, the mixtape masterpiece she and Diplo Hollertronix had spent the 10 previous days putting together in his apartment. Batteries included!

So a large portion of her forthcoming debut, Arular, has willfully gone leaky boat here. Many of her tracks sound similar to one another: A 505 Groovebox queefs out splatty, farty beats and M.I.A. shouts lyrics of varying snark over them, sometimes even singing them. (Sometimes.) She's been irresistible in single land, but M.I.A.'s full-length runs the risk of seeming limited and discrediting her misleading but awesome "female Dizzee Rascal" tag, replacing that description with "Neneh Cherry, Mk. II"-- a label that has likely dawned on anyone who has seen the "Buffalo Stance"-like "Galang" video.

That is why this mixtape kills: The format fits M.I.A. perfectly. Her songs benefit greatly from Diplo's recent baile funk fetish (confer his recent Favela On Blast tape), some choice dub and American hip-hop cuts to break up the blaze to blaze and razorblades, and some flat-out brilliant mashups.

On the upstroke, "Galang" goes reggaeton; on the down, Diplo cops the song a Lil Vicious beat and a lil keyboard hook, and it's so whoa you'll have to punch yourself in the face to stop smiling. "Fire Fire" goes bam bam then walks like an Egyptian in a telling Bangles mashup-- the two songs play so nicely together they could be siamese, until Diplo misdemeans "Pass That Dutch" with M.I.A.'s snakey music box schwarma. M.I.A.'s "Amazon" coupled with Ciara's radio-friendly microcrunk squelch is an early highlight, though that squirmy synth on Clipse's "Definition of a Roller" makes for good freak, too, packing just enough snaggletooth funk to forgive those recent Neptunes missteps.

For a tape whose initial appeal was the instant and gratifying relief it brought to everyone waiting for M.I.A.'s full-length, Diplo ironically saves M.I.A.'s best cuts for last. "URAQT" is a jittery mess of flirting, territory-marking, and text-messaging (!): "You fuckin with my man and you text him all the time/ You mighta had him once but I have him all the time," and later, "U-R-A-Q-T/ Is your daddy dealer, cause you're dope to me!" For dessert, Diplo brings "Big Pimpin'" out of retirement to back M.I.A.'s raspy "Bingo": "Do you know what is on? Do you know what is on? Do you know how this beat is made in fucking Lon-d-d-don?" The song's obviously great, but between M.I.A.'s fierce deliveries and the braggart beat, it sounds weird and ominous, a black-hole closer to an album brimming with life.

Last week, Sasha Frere-Jones profiled M.I.A. in The New Yorker, spraypainting her as a consummate and naturally "world" artist. M.I.A. is silly, dancey, cheap, expensive, truthful, and utterly serious all at once-- just like the world (!). She's not exactly rags-to-riches (yet), but her pop carries unwittingly significant weight, and to potentially far more people than just a few hundred ecstatic MP3 blog readers. It's one thing for M.I.A. to be a "world" pop star; it will be another thing for her to release an album that reflects that backstory. For now, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 takes that burden off of Arular: Diplo has actualized our hopes for M.I.A. qua world pop star, and we didn't even have to leave him cookies.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

I was thinking about this today. Like why Pitchfork felt compelled to say Bodak Yellow was the greatest song of 2017.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Poptimism is an awful disease. The old Pitchfork only would have best-new-musiced a poor man's Nicki Minaj as an April Fools' Day joke.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

I think your guys' timeline about Pitchfork is a bit off here. They were embracing poptimism by the mid-2000s anyway, which is why you have Justin Timberlake winning best song of the year and the best songs of the decade list being filled with top 40 hip-hop. And even when they were only covering indie, it was still done in a completely cynical manner to enhance the Pitchfork brand almost as soon as anyone started taking the site seriously. At most there was maybe a two or three year period between earnest reviews of bad music that few people read (The Dismemberment Plan, Walt Mink, Everclear, and the classic 9.5 for Save Ferris) and trying to be indie trendsetters above all else in order to increase brand value and ad revenue.

Dude.....Walt Mink was fucking awesome.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

I honestly don't think I've ever heard any of The Dismemberment Plan, but I've heard the name a lot before.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.